LOUCHE OPS                                                       

Through the Heel


I never see where the rain falls from.
It comes closer
Like the Annunciating angel
That museum Italians used to paint
Before Raphael or Mike of the Angels
Who could capture a beautiful virgin.
Fra Angelico
Where is your subject matter now
That I might touch the threshold of heaven
The entrance to our world?
And forget the cold rain
Seeping up into
The hole at the heel?
Damn these shoes.


Arnold J. Kemp, 2026

 

Louche Ops is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Arnold J. Kemp.

Kemp has established an impressive career over the last several decades as an artist, writer and educator with a practice that is, at once, both piercing and warm. In his conflations of seemingly heterogeneous materials, objects and conceptual gestures, the works fall into a legible orbit of the artist's sensibilities. 

 

This exhibit, cryptically titled The Return of Painting, is composed of a suite of intimately scaled new paintings, several works on paper that hybridize poetry with painting, prints from an ongoing series in Kemp's oeuvre to do with masks, and a sculpture made in situ from ties owned  by the artist's father, supported by found local architectural remnants. There may not be a pointed narrative to unearth here, but a kind of objective prose emerges suggestive of ruminance, ruin and the melancholic confusion that nags to ask whether the things that haunt us do so in a perpetual return, or if it's simply that nothing ever truly leaves us. 

The Return of Painting is Kemp's first solo exhibition in Germany and will run concurrently with a mid career survey of the artists work Not One Thing, that has already opened to great acclaim at Tufts University Art Galleries. Recent exhibitions by the artist include Un-make | Un-model at M LeBlanc, Chicago; Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather curated by Dieter Roelstraete at University Of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium, Chicago and FALSE HYDRAS  at JOAN in Los Angeles.


*this exhibit has been generously assisted by the Kemmler Foundation
(Kemmler Kemmler GmbH)